Eclipse Shenanigans

There was a time when a full solar eclipse hitting the mainland US would have had me calling in sick, playing hooky, and driving to the path of the cast shadow.

And I'd be lying if I said the thought never occurred to me this year, when an eclipse event just like the description above happened.

But with a one year old who won't remember, and can imagine better times than sitting in a car for fifteen hours only to chill in the sun-less sky for two minutes and then drive home, I'd decided to pass on that experience.

But only this time around...2024, we're all in! And we've got extra eclipse glasses.

I guess there had been a run on those darker-than-welding-glasses especially made for solar events like this, but a colleague had procured hundreds back in May for all of our wards.

Here's a picture another colleague took through the glasses:

Even in LA we had a partial eclipse. Of course the day didn't really change, like, it wasn't dark...maybe like a cloud covered for a second.

My attempts through the glasses were way less successful than this. And in reality it looked way cooler through the glasses than this.

But, I did come prepared.

I brought my Old Reliable camera, my old freebie Digitrex DSC-3000, my first digital camera. I got it as a gift with a gifted computer (it came free with the computer if I remember correctly), and that was back in 2004. We took all of our European pictures with it, and thousands of New York pictures as well. All told, I'm comfortable with an estimate between twelve- and fifteen-thousand pictures over the years.

Anyway, it has issues with the sun, which shows up as a black dot. The solar radiation overwhelms the sensor and renders the white of the sun as a black dot. I remembered that back in 2012 for the annular eclipse visible down here in Long Beach. Back then, I took Old Reliable outside and pointed it right at the sun. The result was a partially obscured black circle. Sweet!

So this past August 21st I loaded up Old Reliable with batteries, and pointed it straight at our partial solar eclipse. The results were pretty nifty:

It was a good day for science.